It’s 2023… People still believe some dude walked on water… And some other dude split the moon in half with a sword… Then put it back… The stupid has been with us since forever.
Possessed by very confused alien souls that got here because an intergalactic alien warlord named Xenu wanted to do a genocide so he rounded up a bunch of other aliens, tied them to volcanoes on Earth, bombed those volcanoes with hydrogen bombs, captured their souls and made them go to therapy.
(For those who may have missed that south park episode)
I mean, that is the crux of the OTs. There’s a reason they tell members that it’s dangerous knowledge that will literally kill anyone who sees or hears it before they’ve been prepared by scientology. Anyone who claims to know and isn’t an OT is clearly lying because they are alive, so the silly alien soul story is clearly a lie until you’ve been brainwashed enough.
The freedoms of speech and expression have morphed into a freedom of stupidity, and it really, really sucks that this isn’t something we as a culture have proven able to repudiate.
Some people have always believed batshit stuff with no good supporting evidence. But anti-intellectualism has been on the rise for the past, day, 30 years in particular.
Carl Sagan presciently called it out in “A Demon-Haunted World” back when new age and crystals and alien abductions were popular woo woo beliefs.
It seems to have become more popular to reject “bOoK LaRnin’” in favor of anti-science, which has also been co-opted for political purposes.
Full quote for somber appreciation, emphasis mine:
I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time – when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness…
The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance
But the difference between science and superstition: science gets closer to the truth over time in spite of ourselves while superstition either keeps the same bullshit or makes up new bullshit regardless of evidence or lack thereof.
Now we step into epistemology. This claim cannot be substantiated. We don’t know if science is getting closer to the truth because we don’t know what the truth is.
Science finds what works, it may or may not be finding the truth. It’s incredibly useful, and gets more useful over time, but we cannot claim that it gives us the truth. We cannot measure the “truthiness” of a science claim.
Unless you assume “If something works, then it’s the truth.”. I wouldn’t support this statement though.
I believe we already were talking about epistemology. :) Science is a means of obtaining knowledge. About what, though?
I suppose “truth” could mean different things in this context. I should have avoided that loaded term or tightly scoped what I meant by it. I meant science is interested in knowledge about how the universe behaves.
Hopefully that doesn’t imply science somehow peeks behind the proverbial curtain to see why things behave as they do. Or answering questions like “what is an electron, really”.
For example, science has progressively refined models describing how quantum mechanics behaves that can be used to make predictions. But it in no way offers any explanation for why quantum mechanics is the way that it is or what particles are, really.
Scientific experiments test whether models predict outcomes or not, thus determining if the models need to be further refined or even replaced.
The point is simply that science is the best way humanity has this far devised to learn how the universe works.
Right now with increasing amount of people not vaccinating their children we see outbreaks of diseases that we have not seen in a very long time. So yeah, not vaccinating your kid kinda means your kid will die or at least will be at much higher risk of premature and completely avoidable death
It’s all about risk. Smoking doesn’t automatically mean you’ll get lung cancer, but it greatly increases your risk. Same goes for refusing any vaccine that could be potentially life saving to a child, it greatly increases their risk of death.
But sorry a meme wasn’t extremely precise with its verbiage lol
I don't think it's so much that people have gotten dumber, there's always been dumb folk, but the age of social media has made them less fearful of looking stupid.
It is better to remain silent at the risk of being thought a fool, than to talk and remove all doubt of it.
There was a ton of stupid conspiracy theories around the whole clones sheep thing back then. I think looking back on that time period (like two decades ago, not one) the dumb conspiracies were forgotten as they didn’t lead to anything outside of fearmongering.
Same for the moon landing, there are still conspiracies that it was all faked.
I never understood the goal of things like denying the moon landings or saying the earth is flat. “Ok, you’re right. Now what?” I especially like that they think NASA is powerful and has a huge budget. Tell that to congress and watch them laugh.
The only thing I can guess is their brains have been fried by dramatized TV shows and movies where plot gives all the relevant information to explain all inconsistencies for a satisfying ending. Sometimes you’re just a person in a cave looking at shadows, trying to find an explanation for everything with the little information you can gather in your life is a waste.
As I tend to say: before social media every village had a village idiot. Now the village idiots are connected, more easily to find and spreading their lack of knowledge.
It’s also allowed then to connect with one another. Pre- digital age, every village had their idiot. Now every village idiot can share their stupidity with one another instantly.
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